Imperial Ottoman

History · Article

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908

The 1908 Young Turk Revolution that forced Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the Ottoman constitution, opening the final phase of Ottoman history.

The Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 was the culmination of decades of opposition to the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The revolution forced the sultan to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876, opened a brief period of parliamentary politics, and set the stage for the final quarter-century of Ottoman history. The events of 1908 to 1909 are central to the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, and they are one of the most studied episodes in the history of the Ottoman Empire.

The background

The opposition to Abdulhamid II had grown steadily through the late nineteenth century. The Young Ottomans, a group of intellectuals led by Namık Kemal and Ziya Paşa, had drafted the first Ottoman constitution in 1876, but the constitution had been suspended by the sultan within a year. The Young Turks, a more loosely organized group that took its name from the earlier movement, was formed in exile, especially in Paris, Geneva, and Cairo, in the 1890s.

The most important of the Young Turk organizations was the Committee of Union and Progress, founded in 1889 by students at the Imperial Medical Academy in Istanbul. The CUP was dominated by army officers and bureaucrats, and it was organized in clandestine cells across the empire. Its leaders included Ahmed Rıza, a sociologist educated in Paris, and Talaat, Enver, and Cemal, the so-called Three Pashas of the later period.

The revolution

The immediate cause of the revolution was the international crisis over Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Habsburg Empire, with Russian support, had occupied the Ottoman provinces in 1878 and had administered them ever since. In October 1908, the Austro-Hungarian government announced the formal annexation of the provinces, and a few weeks later, the Kingdom of Bulgaria declared its independence from the empire. The news reached Istanbul, and the CUP seized the moment.

The revolution began on 3 July 1908, when Major Ahmed Niyazi, a CUP sympathizer, led a small force of soldiers and irregulars into the mountains of Macedonia and demanded the restoration of the constitution. Within days, similar proclamations were issued across the empire. The CUP won the support of the army, the ulema, and the foreign embassies. On 24 July 1908, the sultan issued a rescript restoring the constitution. The Macedonian revolt, which had begun as a local protest against Austro-Hungarian intrigue, was the immediate trigger for one of the central events of the history of the Ottoman Empire.

The aftermath

The revolution opened a brief period of parliamentary politics. The first Ottoman parliament elected under the constitution met in December 1908. The parliament was a lively body, with a free press and vigorous debate. The CUP, however, was not a disciplined political party in the European sense, and it was divided between liberal, nationalist, and authoritarian tendencies.

The counter-revolution of 31 March 1909 was an attempt by conservative forces to roll back the revolution. A mutiny of soldiers and students in Istanbul forced the parliament to depose Abdulhamid in favor of his brother Mehmed V. The CUP, with the help of the army under Mahmud Shevket Pasha, put down the counter-revolution and consolidated its control of the state.

The CUP and the road to the First World War

The CUP established effective control of the empire in 1913 after a coup d’état that brought the Three Pashas to power. The CUP pursued a policy of forced centralization, accelerated modernization, and demographic homogenization. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, in which an estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed, was the most violent expression of the CUP’s policy. The revolution of 1908 had opened a brief window of constitutional rule, and the slide into authoritarian CUP rule and the eventual catastrophe of the war were the final phase of the long end of the Ottoman Empire.

The decision to enter the First World War on the side of the Central Powers was taken by the CUP in November 1914, against the better judgment of many of the surviving Ottoman statesmen. The war itself was a disaster. The empire was invaded from every direction, and by the armistice of 30 October 1918, the empire had lost four-fifths of its prewar territory and a large part of its population. The diplomatic background to the final decades of the empire, including the long crisis that produced the revolution, is rooted in the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, the first great European settlement at Ottoman expense.

Legacy

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 is one of the central events of late Ottoman history. It opened a brief period of constitutional politics, but it also cleared the way for the more authoritarian CUP rule of 1913 to 1918. The legacy of the revolution has been debated by historians for generations. Some have seen it as the first stage of the Turkish national movement that would, under Mustafa Kemal, give rise to the Republic. Others have seen it as the first stage of a long catastrophe that ended with the dissolution of the empire in 1922.

What is clear is that the revolution marked the end of the long autocratic phase of Ottoman politics and the beginning of the modern period. The events of 1908, like those of 1876 and 1922, were turning points in the history of the Ottoman Empire. The long crisis that produced the revolution is itself rooted in the decline and reform of the preceding centuries, and the long arc of Ottoman power that the revolution tried to reverse had begun with the Battle of Mohács and the fall of Constantinople before it. The dynasty itself had been founded by Osman I more than six centuries earlier, and the political institutions that the revolution tried to reform had been built up over the entire Ottoman centuries.